Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence(businessinsider.com) |
Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence(businessinsider.com) |
Have you stopped to consider whether this statement might be more applicable to yourself? "Myopic lies" is at the very least highly exaggerated phrasing, if not itself myopic and a false characterization. If it's not too uncomfortable for you, some honest introspection might be worthwhile.
* Here I'm using the alternate definition of elite - someone with money, power, position, or privilege - and not the conventional "barista with hair colour".
This is propagating the Dunning Kruger effect.
Anyone with a sub 100 IQ should be using AI nearly blindly for questions and life decisions. However, these exact people don't realize AI is smarter than them.
I think we are going to witness a division on a monumental level in our lifetime. People willing to use AI, and people not willing. (However, people not willing will be able to get to speed in literal seconds).
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
Car (like humans) requires a lot of care and maintenance. You have to feed it (gas), park it, and jump through many legal hoops just to use it.
Walking is very often faster, and if not you can just fly or take a taxi.
At least you provided a source! Er… wait, you didn’t even tell us your laptop model, describe the paper other than in terms of token size, or where these well rested graduate students (read: unicorns) hide from the rest of the world.
Give it a bit more effort next time.
I really do not think there is a point to argue here.
Also why you have to be unicorn to comprehend 40 pages paper? I often do it with no sleep, while drunk. Hardly unicorn!
so I COULD take over by hand again like I did the decades before just fine, but I refuse to and instead play a codebase like a RTS - lots of stuff happening in parallel but at all times a understanding where is which thing going on and have the next steps in mind (sometimes directly queued as follow up instructions). For me vibecoding is a strict speedboost and literally gamified projects I work on, and the guardrails not only in textfiles but much more in executable code (linters, tests, dependency checks, playwright, ...) as feedback loops agents can spin on on their own made it all click together to the point my main bottleneck is stuff like the Codex app itself using high CPU and memory on my local mac.
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
So, yeah, I can see why the kids are over it.
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
Yes, I can tell.
Using two symbols of technology: AI (advanced modern technology) Shoes (cheap, basic materials)
You were saying the following, in essence, no? "My grandfather got shoes and was happy, new kids get AI and are not happy."
This is the whole paragraph:
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
Minsky, while a significant contributor to science and technology, is also a known participant in Epstein sex trafficking.
Him and a few other men at MIT are responsible for the long relationship between the university and the notorious child sex trafficker.
I don't know about mentioning that one.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
But perhaps whether or not his stance is correct, the students needed to hear this. They (we) have to believe human brains still have value and find a way out; for otherwise there'd be no point to try anymore.
Kids want to learn, they value learning, they get a sense of pride and accomplishment when they learn new things and concepts.
The students cheering Woz is not about truth but about hope.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
Stark contrast to other tech leaders...
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it. But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
Everyone was hating on the Google CEO but I really almost had a crash out of how out of touch Scott Borchetta sounded on stage too. Glad there's one good Apple out there.
Also Woz still goes to campus every so often, it’s not like he’s banned or not accessible. Deep loyalists though love to mock him for being a bit…too honest…which I find unfortunate because he is honestly a very kind and fun person. I’ve spent time with Woz, and have nothing but positive things to say about him.
To be clear I think Woz is great, I was just referring to listening to years of behind his back comments made by leaders at the company who look down on him for being too open, which as you know is not “allowed”.
I laughed when I read this, imagining a weird act of self-congratulation in front of a silent audience.
But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.
most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.
Could be interpreted as Steve himself cheered. Or it could be interpreted as the passive which is meant here but I would argue it should then say "Steve Wozniak cheered at after telling..." but I am not a native speaker.
The original title "Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'" can not be interpreted in the way that Steve cheered as far as I know.
Where would the skill issue be? Please be specific.
How is the original title not less ambiguous to you? Do you see other interpretations than I mentioned above or do you disagree with my interpretations?
He's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth people I've ever worked with.
Aren't students, at least anecdotally, outsourcing a lot of _their_ work to LLMs? And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
> And upon graduation when they're told that it's their future they don't like it?
They aren't being told it's their future. They're being told they have no future because AI will remove the world's dependence on them (well, the professional side of it at least).
AI stands for artificial intelligence. Trying to give it an opposite meaning just is going to confuse everyone.
>Is there a way we can duplicate a routine a trillion times and have it work like a brain? AI is one of those attempts.
AI is not trying to recreate a brain. It is trying to implement intelligence. GPT works nothing like the brain works.
This is typical for a university though. All they do is teach you things that are not really true. If you asked AI what AI stood and what it means you will get a much better answer than this Steve guy.
What can LLM's do that can't be done by a human?
I remember before LLMs, someone on HN made a bot to program automatically by pulling the top rated answers from stackoverflow. To me agentic coding just feels like the next iteration of this.
And LLMs in general feel like an iteration on search.
The strengths and weakness of LLMs are already apparent, and in my opinion unlikely to change from here.
Perhaps what people forget is that every great product builds on the past in a way to improve it. Buggy software and lame copywriting and kids not learning is not revolutionary. The people continuing to prioritize quality will be the revolutionary ones. Garbage is not revolutionary.
Is the short AI generated? This is confusing.
Our value isn't predicated on our utility. The simple fact that we are sentient beings, capable of joy and suffering, gives us value. This is why we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled - we value them regardless of any practical utility we may derive from them.
If you go through life believing that your value depends on your practical utility, then things like AI are an incredibly scary existential threat. But denial is not a healthy way to cope with this threat. The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
"He said it was unreasonable to focus on "how much energy it takes to train an AI model, relative to how much it costs a human to do one inference query."
"It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart," he said. "And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you."
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/23/altman-you-t...
Or one I prefer, though unattributed: "If the only lens through which you can view life is value in currency, that which is priceless becomes worthless."
People will understandably ask, what is the actual value of being capable of joy and suffering?
I frame it another way. There is value in affording all beings dignity, respect, and the opportunity to thrive. The question of our individual value as a being is undignified. People can be more or less valuable to a particular effort, but there should be no question about their worth as a person. It should not be a part of how we understand people and ourselves.
It is a healthy conclusion that your value doesn't depend on your practical utility, because that will come and go and is sometimes beyond your control. Your value isn't a question at all.
In the moral sense, sure.
But our modern day capitalist hellscape has made it extremely clear that if you aren't capable of providing value for shareholders, your life literally has no value. That's the reason the US government keeps cutting welfare programs, why union suppression exists.
The fact of the matter is that unless you are producing value for shareholders, you don't get to participate in society and are left to starve to death. No amount of flowery language is going to feed and house the unemployed. And we are running full speed into a situation with the explicit and overt goal of cresting as many unemployed people as possible while simultaneously ensuring that there are no resources or help offered to those unemployed people.
Flowery language will cover up the starving bodies in the streets the same way a can of febreeze will cover up a landfill. This is an enormous problem and if we don't fix it, people will die. Whether or not a human has intrinsic moral value by simply existing, we require money to survive in this society. A human life may be a mystical beautiful and valuable concept, but our society has determined that if you don't have money, you literally do not deserve to live.
That's what these students are so angry about. They're being pushed into a world that refuses to employ them and which delivers a death sentence for the crime of unemployment.
Otherwise you get effects like;
* Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
* Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
I'll admit that knowledge isn't practical, and you can't always identify when you're creating it, and a lot of people don't think in these terms and there's a lot of intuition involved, along with societal mores about caring for people which help the growth of knowledge as general rules without getting all bean-counting about it. But I think it matters that hedonism is an incoherent motivation and that creating knowledge is a far clearer one (and hedonism tends to turn into creating knowledge, anyway, if you like meaning). Hedonism, utilitarianism, same difference.
It is very easy to get lost in between them, especially when listening to a good speaker who can flitter between those meanings at will.
What is worse is that those values interact. We indeed we continue to support and care for the elderly and the disabled, but only up to a point, and there is a reasonable discussion how exactly should countries divide their limited resources between vulnerable groups, including families with young kids. In that context, the future economic and societal value of a 5 y.o. vs. a 85 y.o. inevitably creeps up.
Yes it is. If human life was inherently valuable then the concept of poverty wouldn't exist because the entity that sees it as valuable would be willing to spend resources on maintaining it.
> The solution is to recognize the value inherent in us as humans, and to demand public policies that reflect this fact.
Most social programs keep expanding until they become unsustainably expensive. You can't just make a law "everyone gets free money" and expect this to have no negative consequences.
I really like ‘Actual Intelligence’, that’s a clever one from Woz. People need to be reminded to use their brains, they’re a brilliant product of evolution (or your favourite god’s work).
Having great tools means more impressive solutions, not fewer blacksmiths.
“You’re right - I overstepped”
Is the new “You’re absolutely right”.
I don’t know if we can qualify something that actively goes against the explicit instructions you give it as “something great”. It just sounds like Dario is building snake oil and selling it too.
Dario used to at least emphasize the potential positives of AI while being worried about the negatives, but unlike Hassabis/DeepMind he has done nothing to bring about the positive part and is now just accelerating the harmful part as fast as he can. Google is an AI company, bringing us things like AlphaFold, and Anthropic (also OpenAI) are just LLM companies.
My company actually did an internal study of agent usage for coding and found it only improved productivity by 10-20%, basically on the same level as good code templates or an autocomplete.
AI gets better and better at operating self-supervised, and the amount of skill needed to supervise an AI in a useful fashion only ever goes up.
That's still a pretty good outcome. 20% more output across a company is huge when you think about it. Definitely not going to change the world completely though.
> No AI company is addressing the elephant in the room that you need someone experienced constantly monitoring any agentic workflows. This means that the cost savings of agents are a myth.
I mean, it depends on the agentic workflow. Like for production code, definitely. For document and claim review, you probably need a targeted sample on a daily basis but you get massive gains.
That does not matter when discussing its practicality; or whether they will cause drivers to lose jobs.
Sounds like you're talking about AGI, not AI. AI is here today.
I thought that was the objective of these celebrity speeches.
AI will be there, but it'll transform. When I say I don't use AI (i.e. LLMs, chat interfaces, agents and "autocomplete") for coding, research and whatnot, people label me as a luddite. The fact is I know how to use them. I test them from time to time. Occasionally these tools help. More often they hinder.
"Resistance is futile, hand your brain over!" is a hype filled dystopian fatalism noting that future is inevitable. It's inevitable. You can use this correctly, and we don't got back to our senses to understand how to use this correctly and efficiently.
We are just cooking our planet right now, with heat, poisoned water and slop.
A TON of companies are getting looted by the AI labs and AI users. Many will not survive. I think Meta will be one of them (a shell of their former selves by 2030). The ones who survive to thrive in the 2030s will be the ones that are relentlessly focused on their customers and products, not the process. If you don't regularly hear both "AI would be awesome for that" and "actually AI probably won't be good for that", your company won't make it. You'll either get lapped by the companies who find the strong use-cases, or you'll get looted by infinite and aimless tokenmaxing. The path through the middle is far more narrow than most companies realize, and some major, major companies are waking up to that harsh reality; for some, too late.
Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.
Also even with agents, you can't just try and error your way out of some (most) of the problems I encounter without doing harm if the solution fails.
Might be different if used for infrastructure as code or ansible or some such. That I can see.
Having a chat with chatgpt may give you clues or ideas when you have gone throught your own checklist of what could have went wrong, but can go only as far.
Agent on the other side will decompile .dll to find out issues if needed to go deep enought.
Right now the AI marketing paradigm is to create rockstar superusers who can (supposedly) do the job of hundreds of individuals at the speed of light! Which bleeds into the design paradigm, which is trash. I’m bullish on AI that can be used more cooperatively and collectively by a company.
Hell, even Microsoft is having trouble paying Anthropic’s API rates.
There is a ceiling to how much people are willing to pay for work slop. Just look at the backlash to GitHub Copilot’s token based billing changes.
I don’t want to live in a world where the barrier to entry on entrepreneurship is how much you can pay Anthropic or OpenAI.
Sometimes using something well involves not using it at all.
That is absolutely insane. Thing is I can honestly believe that it happens, which makes it even more insane.
I see the point of your argument when this is done by inexperienced developers, as they wouldn’t know what’s happening but for those who knows and guide what has to be done, I don’t see much difference. It’s about understanding the outcome, and evaluating the risk.
AI doesn’t really fix that or is really even that suited for it. In many cases it makes it worse.
That’s why you see software quality going down. Developers aren’t told to make better quality software even though AI does really make that easier. Instead they’re told to make more software faster for cheaper.
Cheap, Fast, Quality. Pick two. Business will pick cheap (short term) and fast every single time.
...and that time never comes in most cases. Because monies are earned in exchanged for that debt and, management cares about monies. They don't see that debt as important, or as debt at all.
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
Every teenager goes through it, some still try to find their place until the day they day, but we all grow up in vastly different contexts and environments compared to what we experience as adults, and stuff keeps happening around us that we don't like, maybe don't even want to participate in, but because of the lack of alternatives, you don't really have a choice.
"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children."
I think we've forgotten this. We are not paying it forward any more as a society.
On an unrelated note, I haven't used an Iphone since 2018 and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better. I do see "Apple Intelligence" being advertised everywhere and besides AI summaries of texts on the notifications bar I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
Siri is basically unchanged, it looks like they have had serious problems getting LLMs, or generative AI in general to be reliable and 'safe' enough to put their own name on it. By 'safe' I mean thinks like not generating emails based on Mein Kampf, or doodles of genitals, or hallucinating false 'facts'.
Not a concern for many of the frontier AI providers with no reputation to burn, but not exactly on-brand for Apple. I very much doubt Jobs would have viewed that differently.
I too would say Jobs probably would have an human angle on it, but he also famously was a tyrant who struggled with people not doing exactly what he asked, and could be slightly nitpicky about that, maybe having a robot that follows exactly what he wrote, to a fault, would be a machine he'd greatly enjoy.
Or he'd throw it in the trash with some flourish of words explaining how a machine could never feel frustrated so therefore couldn't great excellent products, or something.
Steve Jobs really cared about his users, and putting out great products for those users.
I imagine he would have loved all the machine learning stuff that Apple has being doing the past few years (stuff like voice noise separation, instant text OCR and photo object isolation).
Based on the story about the first iPod being too big, dropping a prototype in a fish tank, lots of air bubbling up and him going "there's your space", or the disdain he displayed about how crappy Mobile.me was, I imagine he would have recognized LLMs for the flakey product they are and would have been very wary of introducing them into users their workflow.
> .. and I wonder if Siri has gotten any better ..
Siri is still crap, but so is Gemini. Both still do incredibly stupid stuff like when you try to request some music on Spotify "cannot find the artist or song 'My Playlist Hard Techno'" / play some unknown vaguely matching artist. Or it'll do an internet search for "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes". Or ask "for how long should I set your timer?" and name the timer "goose oven cooking timer ten minutes" which in a way is even more stupid.
You'll get some naysayers here saying stuff works perfectly, but its that inconsistency that sucks. Sometimes it'll one-shot a really difficult voice command or obscure song search. And then other times (many times..) I have to yell at it three times to set a timer, at which point I sigh, realize doing it manually would've been faster, and set the timer manually.
In a way its made me realize LLMs and voice assistants aren't that good, it's just that even tech people have incredibly low standards. Especially the people working in AI.
Steve believed “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”.
https://youtu.be/EZll3dJ2AjY?t=114
Which, to their credit, seems to be what Apple tried to do with Apple Intelligence and was already doing with Machine Learning. But if under Steve they had over promised and under delivered—like what happened under Cook—some heads would probably have rolled.
> I wonder if Siri has gotten any better.
Nope. There are rumours the new one will use Gemini and be better, but who knows. We’ve heard this before.
> I haven't seen anything to understand what Apple Intelligence actually means.
When it was announced, I thought it was a brilliant piece marketing in the sense of associating the “A” in AI with Apple. But then it turned out to be trash, so turns out the association is a hindrance. Anyway, you know how Microsoft uses “Copilot” for anything they ship which has “AI” in it? That’s Apple Intelligence. It’s the umbrella term for anything anywhere in one of their products where they use any kind of AI/ML.
Luckily, this doesn't seem to happen to everyone, especially if you aren't a public figure, a billionaire nor a successful startup founder, but that particular combination seems to make it extra likely you experience this transformation.
Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
I feel like that is a trait necessary to do what Woz did throughout his life.
> Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak got cheers, not boos, after telling students they 'all have AI — actual intelligence'
Modern journalism deserves a lot of criticism, but this headline is not one of those cases
Loose cannons have their uses in organisations (they can say things senior people find uncomfortable without fear of repercussions).
1st of May, 7pm - https://youtu.be/LHEW8Da5550?t=2757
2nd of May, 10am - https://youtu.be/4sSfADusN40?t=2586
2nd of May, 3pm - https://youtu.be/-bn3ydOuMm4?t=2855
Historically (in the USA), capitalism was paired with charity and supporting those around you (primarily for religious reasons).
One of the greatest downsides of the welfare system is that people don't give the money to others themselves (it's instead stripped from them and doled out without their input). They don't get to experience the good feelings that come from helping another person (only negative feelings about the government taking their money).
This removes the habits of practicing selflessness and it's positive feedback loop. As a result, we get all the downsides of capitalism with a trained selfish cohort who have no charitable feelings to counterbalance things.
This only proves that injustice exists. Surprise: injustice still exists.
I'm hoping that you're still young and primarily motivated by survival, which can lure you into this cold world view. I think the reality is an inversion of that old "if you're not liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you're not conservative by 30 you have no brain" chestnut.
Hopefully once you've made it past the raw basics of survival and the feelings of a dog-eat-dog world, you can look back and realize that compassionate people helped you over and over throughout your life, maybe without you even realizing it at the time. The next step is to realize that you can extend that same compassion to others.
Likewise, most of the time you don't have social programs, somebody will introduce social programs. You can't just say "no social programs" and expect this to have no positive consequences... okay this is falling apart a bit, but the point is, what makes 'not expanding UBI' so much harder than 'not introducing UBI'? If you can convince people that introducing UBI will lead to expanding UBI and that that is bad, what's stopping you from just convincing them of the latter?
Another similarity is the relative simplicity of the underlying structure of the system. You essentially have two hammers (one small one you swing with your hand and another big one that is planted on the ground), some material, and some heat. You build the rest.
Another similarity is the resistance to automation. A skilled blacksmith is a versatile worker. You can create assembly lines to automate any one thing they might produce. The end product will not have the same quality--it will not truly be wrought iron, each piece will not be unique, there will be nothing of the aesthetic taste of the artist in it, but if you're just some bean counter who doesn't care about those things you'll be able to sell it. But if you need the optionality to produce any of those things.. automation is not your friend. And some things just cannot be automated, at least not without extreme costs or very poor results--shoeing horses comes to mind.
unless he plans to freeze the training data at this point and use that for another billion years, the cost of building AI will always be more than the cost of humanity.
Wow! Well said! so shouldn't we focus on ... fixing humanity first?
> there should be no question about their worth as a person
Dignity, respect, thriving, and even human worth don't exist without joy and at least a concept of suffering.
The lifeless dust and rock of the moon is an simpler value proposition to quantify than the messy intrinsic value of overlapping, ever-changing life here on Earth.
For example, BBC News right now says "Jury discharged in Ian Watkins pirson murder trial", "Carrick confirmed as Man Utd permanent boss", "Ex-soldier jailed after woman..."
Okay, in this example it's more ambiguous because "cheered" does not have to take an object. But native speakers are primed to expect a passive sentence here.
While it's technically ambiguous
The 'is' is not required because it's using newspaper headline grammar.
It's hilarious, when you boil away all the froth and hype, that we've collectively decided that "talk to computer" is somehow worth an entire generation of venture capital and maybe even the whole stock market. It's a dumb idea to begin with. A mouse and keyboard are better.
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
Applying the actions is unsolved. Unless you YOLO the LLMs, taking stateful actions automatically requires a lot of protective infrastructure, solid testing infra etc.
It’s all just more code, but a “create me a shopping website” LLM is likely not going to be doing the infrastructure level thinking required to handle it for now.
Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...
They don’t go out of their way to bolt the features to everything the phone does or make it particularly difficult to turn them off. That’s probably one of the last major reasons I still have an iPhone.
Microsoft in comparison forces you to use OneDrive, has copilot tapping on your glass like clippy every five seconds, etc. The desperate pleas to use these features are embarrassing
Current young generations are the first that will, on average, work harder than their parents and have less to show for it. Affordability is absolutely vile and oligarchs have more decision making power then they've ever had in my lifetime, at least. No. Prospects are poor and governmental debt is absolutely unsustainable.
But I guess they've ve got cell phones and social anxiety, so not all bad.
Basically, what's the state QOL, and first/second derivatives of the that state? What direction is everything going? What's the world state young people are growing into? What advice would you give a young person to enable them to achieve the same success as you? - be realistic. You being the average poster on this forum, enriched by the tech boom of the 2000s-2020s - but not necessarily you specifically.
Of course, it will never be enough. The goalposts will move until we run out of them.
...and many people choose to ignore that fact.
If I don't tell Claude about this behavior, it ignores the script output and lies about passing tests that validate if the config files were regenerated.
So I added to my prompt instructions to observe it, and if it sees that message, double check its work and then inform me and ask what to do before proceeding.
This has had the net result of Claude either running the script with the override flag from the get go (explicitly forbidden) or it seeing the message and convincing itself that the override is warranted and running it a second time with the override flag. It's never once stopped to ask me what to do like instructed.
They'd be out of company after a week
I really wish this were true.
Their use of AI so far has been much less "let AI take the wheel and brand it as a product itself" and more "use AI to improve an aspect of <user need>".
> Otherwise you get effects like;
> * Just take drugs, feel meaningless "joy" because that's what you value,
> * Don't do anything less "joyful" even though it's more meaningful.
You could make the point that teaching, and thus furthering the collective knowledge of our species, may be somewhat objectively meaningful, because you impact the trajectory of humanity. But unless you draw joy from that specific fact alone, the joy from creating knowledge is just as selfish as taking drugs to attain a state of bliss (which, again, I don't oppose either.)
Also, I'd even challenge the notion that knowledge alone, at its face value, automatically equates to a benefit for humanity. Harari has made that point far more eloquently than I in Nexus.
But anyway I agree: motivations are arbitrary. Why you even got to do a thing? Just sit and be sessile and die. (This is not a personal attack, or recommended.)
I rely heavily on an assumption that we do all have more or less the same set of values - but this might be cultural, not biological: it's hard to get inside the head of, say, Aztecs, with whatever strange non-modern values they had.
I also make an assumption about knowledge being central among those values, although it's definitely not all that, and some people will say they don't even consider it. But I think they are doing anyway, if they live in the world as we know it.
Side comment: you've made "joy" separate from "bliss" and "meaning" separate from "knowledge", and then there's some undefined "benefit for humanity" that might not be any of those things, along with the apparent value of "impacting the trajectory of humanity" - is that good, just impacting it, in any non-specific way? lol terminology.
And I also made a distinction between knowledge and meaning, which you sort of seem to imply is a universally shared value, while I seriously doubt that is the case. There are many ways to derive meaning from existence that do not involve amassing knowledge - even just passively profiting off of the knowledge of others, but taking no curiosity in that at all.
And as you pointed out, I carefully phrased impacting the trajectory of humanity to avoid implying any moral judgement. People have many reasons for wanting to leave something behind that outlasts them, which may be good or bad or anything in between.
The problem here is that joy-in-itself isn't anything. Say you're a huge hedonist, and you try to maximize your pleasure. Maybe you start with some notion involving a speedboat and cocaine. Then you might ask, how can you maximize your pleasure even more? That means you have to ask why you like things. You like things for reasons, and reasons have meaning, and meaning is knowledge. So maybe your next step is to add music or something. But in doing this your activity isn't just having pleasure, it's finding things out. The more you work at maximizing pleasure, the more you're finding things out, and the less of a cliche the things you enjoy are, and pleasure-in-itself becomes less real, because it never really meant anything. The alternate path is to stick closely to the cliches, ride around coked-up on your speedboat forever, and fail to really have a good time because mechanical behavior isn't genuinely enjoyable and trying to maximise pleasure is self-defeating.
Normal people don't self-reflect, realize they like joy, and then try to maximize this with speedboats and cocaine. If they realize they like joy and want to maximize it, they do things like spend more time with their families.
You'll know were making progress towards AGI when LLMs start being called LLMs again, and something new starts being called AI.
You could legitimately call a thermostat "AI". Expert systems were previously called AI. Today it's Large Language Models. Tomorrow it'll be something else.
More to the point, there has always been a cottage industry in predicting an amazing future, just around the corner. 'AGI' is just the latest incarnation.
This is literally the same with every single technological development.
yup, there are a lot of successful companies today not using the internet :)
We collectively spend decades and decades creating a sophisticated global capitalism, huge networks and infrastructures of trade and travel, just to find ourselves in some dark forest-esque race with everyone else anyway? Is this really consistent to you? What was the point of anything in the last, like 40 years to you if we just need to act like we are still in a cold war, except this time its a war with everyone?
It's a world prestige thing, and also a competitive edge, for better or worse.
But ok, even granting that framing, if the issue is China's placement on the spectrum of "liberal", what would it take for them to be the good enough guys here?
I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.
We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.
Why are you trying to avoid morality? That seems like a good way to never find out anything important, since importance is a moral judgement.
That’s just what I mean: I oppose your notion of a universally shared motivation of deriving meaning from creating knowledge. I don’t have an alternative to offer, because I believe no such objective motivation exists. Instead, it occurs to me you project your own belief system onto humanity (or at least your society) as a whole.
Yes, our world might be shaped most dramatically by those with a desire to create knowledge, but that still doesn’t support the generalisation that humans universally consider the creation of knowledge as a way to give their life meaning.
> Why are you trying to avoid morality?
I try to avoid bringing it into the question of what is and what isn’t a valid motivation for a continued existence, because that is one of the most fundamentally subjective aspects of being a sentient creature. Who am I to make a judgement?
(Which is itself a poor rendition of Nichomachean Ethics...this conversation you two are having is ancient)
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
- Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
- The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
- Some presidents since have been populists
... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
When I say China is a bad choice because it's not as liberal as ~the west, I do imagine a reader in China thinking the opposite. I don't think they're dumb and I don't think they've been duped; they have a coherent ideology that fits their values. I just don't want it to stomp out mine.
Maybe I'm wrong and you can solve for morality or at least the meta-morality of Liberalism/pluralism where you permit various moralities to coexist. Hopefully so. Maybe the value system in China is closer to mine than I imagine and it's just operating under different constraints. But I don't want to gamble on that when winning is within reach and is a guarantee given alignment to any human values is achieved at all.
Think about how much your own writing (and programming, if you were lucky enough to start early) evolved from, say, age 12 (when a lot of smart kids start to tackle 'real' books) to age 18 (when you supposedly have a good enough education for 50% of work in most countries) to age 25.
All of that evolution is a direct result of one thing: practice! But with a magic answer box available in everyone's pocket, it'll take truly Herculean effort from a learner to actually grind through the practice instead of just cheating for an answer. I really worry how much an LLM user will actually comprehend their own code or even prose; if you've scarcely written a line of code, how can you really understand what's going on in a debugger? If you haven't done the legwork of writing essays and constructing coherent arguments and comprehending grammar, how will you ever communicate effectively?
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and these kids will sail a whole level of abstraction above my own understanding of writing and programming, much like how my own generation preferred Python to C, and how the previous generation evolved from assembly to C/BASIC/etc. But then I come back to those missing fundamentals, that empty mental model. It's not like my English or CS teachers had me grind through essays and implementing linked lists and Djikstra's Algorithm for pure busywork. They did it because practice is the only way to truly immerse a student in a practical subject. Maybe it'll work for programming, as long as LLMs get good enough that you can always ask them to fix low-level errors for you? But it seems unlikely to work in prose. And even those generational programming jumps I mentioned (assembly to C to Python) were lossy; most kids I went to school with would be absolutely useless writing C code, and even as a bit of a dinosaur I'm pretty awful at even debugging assembly.
Like you said: you still need to learn grammar and spelling. And I suspect a whole skill tree of other fundamentals!
It still gets things wrong, I can tell as I get through problems.
But it was either that or that dreary 'Cracking the Coding Interview' book. At least I'm learning fundamentals by asking question after question and making it track the concepts I had trouble with.
That's one use. Will most people use it to learn? Probably not. But most people are ... most people.
That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.
For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".
If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.
Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.
If LLMs had shame, they'd surely not repeat mistakes (in the same context window) as much as they do.
People love to put a lot of meaning on what an LLM responds with when asked why it made a mistake, but it's critical to remember that the answer to that prompt is just another series of probabilistic tokens, and has no actual relation to how the error happened.
A lot of human intelligence is really societal rather than individual, based on knowledge transmitted down through generations by writing (the real enabler). If you take that away then what you are left with is something more like an isolated hunter-gather tribe.
You might be redefining words here; there isn't a form of intelligence that isn't actual intelligence. It is all actual intelligence. Artificial in this context means it is something we're creating in a lab. LLMs can't avoid being artificial intelligence. The meaning of "AI" is to artificially create actual intelligence.
And if anything, average AI user is vastly overstating how good/useful it is. Papers about it pretty much always show huge gap between "productivity person thinks they are achieving" and "actual growth of productivity"
If money can buy votes then the problem rests with an apathetic and distracted electorate.
You change that by giving a fuck and telling everyone you know what you actually think.
It's not that "money can buy votes," but for a given party money can buy facilities (offices, transportation, food, etc.) and people (activists, coordinators, etc.) and that can bring (not buy) votes. Printing one "Rodriguez 2027" sign and putting that on your front lawn can be done for free at someone's office; printing ten million of them is a major financial, logistical and organisational undertaking, all of which costs money. Printers, truckers, warehouses, coordinators don't care how many "fucks" you're giving; they just prefer being given dollars to being given "fucks."
Maybe you have more ... workable (?) solutions than "let's get everybody to give a fuck and vote in a different way"?
The LLM does not understand itself in any way.
Your point about writing and social intelligence is, to me, more evidence for the "it's language that's smart, not us" hypothesis. We start off in small bands of hunter-gatherers that store their intelligence in an oral culture. Language then jumps to clay tablets, papyrus, codex books, etc. The printing press allows it to escape containment to a wider public than just a caste of priests and bureaucrats. As soon as we invent automatic calculators, we start networking them and using those to process language, albeit in a primitive way (email, the web, etc.). Recently we discovered some abstruse math that, with the assistance of a bunch of beefy video cards, can crunch centuries of human writing into a mathematical object that encodes at least some of the meaning of that writing into an even more "advanced" symbolic processing machine. There's a clear trajectory of language itself getting more and more free of the specific wetware it grew up on.
It's a falsifiable claim, in that if there is a way to train a useful LLM from scratch without any human authored input language to bootstrap it (something I've been on the lookout for but haven't seen, though admittedly I'm not an AI researcher, just some Linux nerd with a day job as an SRE), then we can disprove it.
For the religious angle, look no further than John 1:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
(This is admittedly less falsifiable!)
I'm sure that we will eventually build artificial brains, capable of bootstrapping communications and language for themelves (if run en-masse in a simulation where the benefit of communication would emerge). An LLM can't do this since it is by definition/construction something only capable of learning a pre-existing language.
An artificial brain, just like a wet jiggly one, is always going to be more intelligent than a one-trick pony like an LLM - a language processor, but it is notable how intelligent that one-trick pony nonetheless appears to be.